RAID

RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to use a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This type of a setup has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive doesn't work, the information will be accessed through the others, and the second one is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. There are different RAID types depending on what number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both performed from all drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Determined by the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Website Hosting

All of the content that you upload to your new website hosting account will be placed on fast SSD drives that operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your site content on top of the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on a number of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops working for some reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue functioning smoothly until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the information is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The SSD drives which are used for saving any content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts that we offer function in RAID-Z. This is a special setup where one or more hard drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will include an additional bit to any data copied on this kind of a hard drive. In the event that a disk fails and is replaced with a new one, what info will be duplicated on the latter shall be a combination calculated between the data on the other hard disks and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the info on the new drive shall be correct. Throughout the procedure, the RAID will continue operating normally and the problematic drive will not affect the normal operation of your websites in any way. Using SSDs in RAID-Z is a fantastic addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our top-notch cloud platform with regard to preserving the integrity of your files since ZFS uses special digital identifiers referred to as checksums to prevent silent data corruption.